As treasurer of Maine Citizens Against Taxing Water, I urge your readers to think twice before they sign a petition to place a new tax on the bottled water industry in Maine. Supporters of this new tax, led by Jonathan Carter and Jim Wilfong, are scrambling to get enough signatures in the next few weeks to put this issue on the ballot next year. Let’s hope they don’t make it, because this is a fight Maine doesn’t need.

They say the new tax will protect drinking water and help small business, but it will do neither. All it will do is put a big target on the back of our bottled water industry and Poland Spring in particular, a great company and one of Maine’s great business success stories. A little over two decades ago, Poland Spring was bankrupt and had fewer than 30 employees. Today, it employs 550 people in Maine and pays more than $65 million to other Maine companies for goods and services.

Poland Spring is also a responsible steward of Maine’s natural resources and spends millions of dollars each year to carefully monitor and protect all of its water sources.

It’s ironic that this new tax is being proposed at the same time that Poland Spring wants to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in new facilities in rural Maine, which could create up to 300 new jobs: New investment, good paying jobs, clean, non-polluting industry – isn’t this what Maine needs more of?

Peter E. Geiger, Lewiston